Methodology
By Rene Roost
This page describes how the quarterly reports are produced — what's measured, how the terms are defined, how articles are ranked, and where the limits of the method lie. It applies to every report in the series.
What I measure
Around the clock, every day since late 2025, my scraper records which articles appear on each publication's own "Most Read" or "Most Popular" list, and in what order. That's the entire input. I don't measure pageviews, shares, comments, or social engagement — I have no access to any of that. I record the position a publisher chose to show its readers.
These lists are themselves derived from reader clicks. That's what makes them worth tracking: the ranking on this site is a measurement of a measurement of real reading behaviour, with no editorial curation inserted on my end.
The one place a language model enters the pipeline is descriptive, not evaluative: I use an LLM only to categorize and tag articles by subject. It never scores an article, ranks one, or has any part in deciding what counts as popular — every Popularity Score and every ordering on this site is derived purely from the recorded position data.
Definitions
Observation — the atomic unit of the record: one article seen in one slot at one reading. Every figure below is aggregated up from these.
Total Index Footprint — the cumulative hours an article was visible anywhere on a publication's list, whether or not that presence was continuous.
Peak Residency — the cumulative hours an article spent at #1. An article that reaches #1 twice has both stints counted here.
Position Path — the ordered sequence of rank changes, with each rank's share of the
article's total footprint shown in parentheses. For example, 1 (65%) → 2 (17%) means
the article spent 65% of its tracked life at #1, then 17% at #2. Shares are rounded and may not sum to 100.
Median Duration — the median cumulative hours an article stays visible anywhere on a publication's list. Half of that publication's articles lasted longer; half lasted less.
90th Percentile Duration — the duration threshold only the top 10% of longest-lasting articles cross.
Turn Rate (per 24h) — how many times a single slot on the list refreshes with new content in a day. It is derived arithmetically as 24 ÷ median duration, so it restates the median rather than measuring anything independent.
Popularity Score — the ranking used throughout the reports and across the site. It weights both how long an article stayed on a list and how high it climbed. The exact formula is not published; it's the core of this site.
Article archetypes
Each deep-dive entry in the reports is tagged with a shape — a description of how the article moved through the list over its lifetime — wherever one of the shapes below applies. A reign is a real stint at #1 (at least 15% of the article's Total Index Footprint); a dominant reign is one of at least 30%; a graze is a passing touch at #1 below the reign threshold. The seven shapes are defined by fixed quantitative rules so that the label is reproducible from the position path, not a matter of opinion:
| Archetype | Quantitative definitional rules |
|---|---|
| Multi-Strike Apex | Two or more separate #1 blocks, each lasting at least 15% of the article's Total Index Footprint, combined with a total footprint of 70 hours or more — two genuine commanding stints at the top, not incidental touches. |
| Monolithic Overlord | A single continuous block at #1 accounting for 80% or more of the article's Total Index Footprint. |
| Perennial Contender | Never reaches #1, yet sustains a Total Index Footprint of 70 hours or more while making three or more distinct upward moves among the lower slots — a long-lived runner-up that stayed in contention without ever topping the list. |
| Sub-Peak Oscillator | Reaches #1 but never holds it for a single continuous stint of 30% or more of its Total Index Footprint — no dominant reign — then makes three or more distinct upward moves among the below-#1 slots after leaving the top. |
| Abrupt Cliff | Held a dominant reign at #1 — a single continuous block of 30% or more of the Total Index Footprint — then falls from the top by two or more slots, to #3 or worse, on its final departure from a genuine stint (not a lone passing touch), with no subsequent return to #1. |
| Soft-Landing Decline | Reaches #1 exactly once, after which every recorded move is non-improving — each reading at the same slot or lower. |
| Fading Dominant | Held a dominant reign at #1 — a single continuous block of 30% or more of the Total Index Footprint — then fades: after it last leaves #1 the trajectory trends downward, with no single recovery of more than two slots. The noisy-tailed counterpart to the Soft-Landing Decline. |
Some articles satisfy more than one rule. Where that happens the report assigns the first match in this order of precedence: Multi-Strike Apex, Monolithic Overlord, Perennial Contender, Sub-Peak Oscillator, Abrupt Cliff, Soft-Landing Decline, Fading Dominant. The order runs from the most structurally specific shape to the most general, so the rarest qualifying pattern always wins. A minority of articles match no shape at all — for instance, a dominant peak whose tail recovers by several slots before fading — and these are left untagged rather than forced into a category they don't fit.
How the data is collected
Position telemetry is captured by a standalone scraper that reads the public-facing, reader-accessible "Most Read" and "Most Popular" lists of each monitored source and records the article in each slot along with its rank. Nothing behind a login or paywall is read; the scraper sees only what any visitor to the list would see.
Reconstruction of missing readings
The scraper occasionally misses a reading. When that happens, short gaps are reconstructed rather than left blank: the rank order is interpolated between the real readings on either side of the gap. Two rules keep this conservative:
- Only short gaps are filled. Gaps longer than three consecutive missed readings are left unfilled entirely.
- No article is ever invented. Reconstruction can only place an article that was already present on the list both before and after the gap. It never introduces a story that wasn't there.
Every reconstructed reading is flagged in the data, so any figure can be recomputed using directly recorded readings only. This creates two separate measures of record quality. Coverage is how much of the quarter a source was being recorded at all: gaps too long to reconstruct are left blank, and they surface as reduced coverage rather than as reconstructed readings. Directly recorded is, of the readings that do exist, the share captured first-hand rather than interpolated. A source can be strong on one axis and weak on the other — steady tracking with many short, patchable gaps looks very different from long stretches of no record at all. Where either measure is weak enough to matter, the report gives its headline figures both ways.
Counting only directly recorded readings slightly undercounts an article's true time on the list, because hours nobody observed aren't counted. Counting reconstructed readings as well may overcount. The two figures bracket the real value; for sources with near-complete records they are effectively identical.
Limitations
Timing precision. The record is built from discrete readings, so every duration carries a small measurement error. A very short-lived article can rise and fall between two readings and leave little or no trace, and the exact start and end of any article's run are approximate.
Corpus definition and window edges. Each report's corpus is defined by article publication date within the quarter, matching what the site's own by-source filters display. Membership is set by that publication date, but an article's duration is then counted in full: a story published near the end of a quarter that keeps charting into the next one has all of its readings counted, including those past the quarter boundary, so its longevity is not truncated at quarter's end.
Single vantage point. All readings are taken from one location, logged out. If a publisher personalises or A/B-tests its list by region or visitor, these figures reflect one such view rather than a canonical global list.
Publisher mechanics. A Most Read list is generated from reader clicks, but each publisher decides how those clicks become a ranking: over what time window, which articles are eligible, how many slots are shown. Those rules aren't published and they differ between outlets. So the durations here measure how long an article survived a given publisher's ranking process — a faithful record of what real readers made popular, filtered through ranking rules whose output I can observe but whose workings I can't inspect.
Method version 1.0 (Q2 2026). Material changes to the method will be noted here with a date. Spotted something wrong? Get in touch.